Wednesday, June 28, 2017

What we
know so far of yesterday’s confusing incident is that a group of agents of the
CICPC (intelligence police) flew a police helicopter over the buildings of the Venezuela’s
Supreme Justice Tribunal and Interior Minister. Several shots were fired at the
buildings from the helicopter and at least one grenade was thrown. No injuries
were reported.

The helicopter had
been commandeered by Oscar
Pérez and a group of at least four more officers. Pérez published a video
explaining that his aim was to “return power to the democratic people.”

The government is
also being accused of conspiracy. Some opposition supporters expressed via
social networks their suspicions that the actions could have been staged by the
government as an excuse for further militarization and repression. Francisco
Toro of Caracas Chronicles hypothesized that the event could be a “false
flag” by the government: “(Oscar Perez’s) video looks like a two-bit parody of
what an underpaid TeleSUR intern thinks the opposition looks and sounds like

,” wrote Toro. However he concluded that he
leans more to Pérez being a “random lunatic”.

The government
however was quick to alert of an unfolding coup attempt. On early evening,
president Maduro
said on television that the event had been a “terrorist attack” and that
the armed forces would be deployed in full to stop the coup.

The Ministry of Information
issued
a statement saying that the event was part of “an escalation of a coup
against the Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and its
institutions.” Oscar Pérez, says in the statement, “is under investigation for
his links with the CIA and the United States Embassy in Caracas, and for his
links with an ex-minister of Interior (of Venezuela), who has recently
publically confirmed his contacts with the CIA.”

The “ex-minister of
Interior” mentioned is Miguel
Rodríguez Torres, who said in a news conference that he in fact had had
contacts with the CIA as Chavez’s Interior Minister and under his orders. “When
I was the director of the intelligence services, president Chávez told me that
we should have the best relations with all the other intelligence services of
the world, including the CIA,” said
Rodríguez Torres.

Here is the transcription
made by Telesur of the statement read by Information Minister Ernesto Villegas
yesterday (the statement has not yet been published in the MINCI web page):

Friday, June 23, 2017

“The Bolivarian
National Police and the Bolivarian National Guard have done a heroic effort to
act without firearms,” president Maduro told international correspondents
yesterday at the presidential palace.

When asked by the BBC
correspondent in Caracas, Daniel García (@danigmarco), about the case
of Fabian Urbina, fatally shot by a National Guard during protests in Caracas
in July 19, Maduro said that in any such cases the agents responsible for the
shootings have been detained by authorities, “the second such incidents happen.”

But also, Maduro
added, “I have ordered an investigation to find out if there is a conspiracy [behind those cases], so that the People
may know. I can’t be fooled compadre,
nobody can think that if I have clearly given orders not to use firearms, and
if there are the contention mechanisms in place of gas and pellet guns,
somebody could take a picture of himself holding a firearm. Don’t you think
that’s strange?” asked Maduro.

“Photographers,
photographers everywhere. How many photographers do you find in an opposition
protests? Sometimes more than the protesters themselves. So I have ordered an
investigation, because there is too much money behind all this compadre, to many dollars,” explained the
president.

Saturday, June 17, 2017

Questions by the
opposition about the mental
health of president Chávez were common before his death. His
successor Nicolás Maduro has also been “psychologically diagnosed” by
critics. Venezuelan government agencies and officials are increasingly also
using a rhetoric taken from the field of psychology with political intent:
opposition to the government, or even “critical chavismo”, is regularly now labeled in government media as a mental
disorder. Opposition discourse is also analyzed as part of a “psychological war”
aimed at the Venezuelan people.

The trend was originally
set by PSUV leader Jorge Rodríguez, a psychiatrist and mayor of the Libertador
Municipality of Caracas. Rodriguez has hosted a public television show called Politica
desde el Divansince 2015 (watch the first episode here.) According
to its web page description, in the show “political subjectivities, discourses,
classical tensions, and the forces that produce the social scene are analyzed, arguing
that politics, no matter its nature, is constituted by measurable and scientifically
verifiable (facts).” In practice, Rodríguez regularly analyses opposition
figures and questions their mental sanity. He explains the opposition discourse
as a whole as a part of a “psychological war” waged by the Empire and its local
allies against the Bolivarian revolution.

Psychological diagnoses
have also been waged against internal government critics. Most recently PSUV
leader and National Assembly deputy Pedro
Carreño formally asked the Supreme Justice Tribunal to name a medical board
to evaluate the mental health of Attorney General Luisa Ortega Díaz, who has criticized
the Constitutive Assembly called by president Maduro. “The attorney is showing
signs of mental insanity, and her appointment should therefore be revised,”
diagnosed Carreño.

Information Minister Ernesto Villegas
was the keynote speaker for the inauguration of the event. He encouraged the 11
international psychologists participating in the forum to discuss the “manipulation
of information mechanisms used in the spiral of fascist violence now lived by the
country. (…) Do not leave outside the range of your radar the extent and
severity of the fascist phenomenon in the country,” asked Villegas in his speech.

During the academic
sessions, according
to government media, international experts devoted most of their attention
to the analysis of the “main psychological operations used by the right-wing against
the revolution in Venezuela.” For example, research by Argentinian psychologist
Mario Colussi has led him to conclude that “under a systematic and progressive
attack scheme, a plan of economic strangling, that has also created the
conditions for a psychological war, has been stablished in Venezuela.”

The Venezuelan
psychologist Fernando Giuliani, also a participant in the forum, pointed out
that “the right-wing is trying to create stereotypes and prejudices in order to
diminish critical capacity (capacidad reflexiva)
of the populace, so that the populace itself will generate the conditions for
the overthrow (of the government).”

The idea that the
enemies of the revolution are waging a “psychological war” has also been argued
by pro-government pollster Hynterlaces since 2015. In its reports Hynterlaces
has regularly accused the opposition of “inducing neurotic responses” in the
Venezuelan people (In this blog here,
here,
and here.)

Friday, June 9, 2017

President Maduro is
launching a preemptive conspiracy theory against what he says is a future plot against
the Constituent Assembly he is convening. He is calling for “civic-military
union” against this plot.

“If one of these days
Venezuela wakes up to news of a conspiracy, of a plot, to stop the popular
constituent process, which has been constitutionally set for July 30, I call
upon the civic military union to defeat, on the streets, the conspiracy, the
plot, the coup d’état, that could be staged against the call for a Constitutive
(Assembly),” the President said
yesterday.

Apparently referring
to the Attorney General, Luisa Ortega Díaz, who has filed
a petition to the Supreme Court of Justice to halt the Constitutive
Assembly process, Maduro warned against “traitors and treasons.”